9 March 2010

Now @ ANU

I’m now in my fourth week of a PhD in Computer Science at the Australian National University under the supervision of Professor Brendan McKay (of nauty fame). My topic is as yet still not completely defined, but at the moment it is to do with comparison of graph generation algorithms.

PEPM’10

In January this year, I presented a paper on my SourceGraph program at the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM), a reprint of which is available here. For those of you who are interested, the slides are used (which were heavily edited the night before I gave my talk!) are also available. I would have made these available before now but as soon as I arrived back in Australia I was busy getting ready to move down to Canberra, and I only obtained internet access last week.

The experience was interesting: not only was this the first time I have presented at a professional conference, it was also the first time I had even attended one. What made it even more interesting was the large proportion of people who presented there who (like myself) were not from the actual targeted field (e.g. Florian Haftmann who presented a paper on Isabelle and Haskabelle is from a theorem-proving background).

I’m still working on SourceGraph (if you compare the paper to my Honour’s thesis you should be able to spot the improvements it has already); however, the fact that I actually have university work I’m meant to be doing is proving a hindrance.

Other Projects

Generic graph class

Some people have expressed interest in whether or not I’ve gotten anywhere on my generic graph class proposal. The answer is that I have a rough-and-ready form of one based upon initial discussions I had with Cale Gibbard that uses associated types to define various types such as the vertex type, vertex label type and arc label type. However, the main stumbling block at this stage is that I wanted to add a sub-class dealing with “mappable graphs”, i.e. those graph types that support applying a mapping function over the vertex and arc labels. The problem is, superclass equalities have not yet been implemented within GHC as of 6.12 (but maybe 6.14 will have them). In any case, if anyone is interested I can send them the current messy version, but even without the mappable graphs class it still requires at least GHC 6.10 for associated types support.

Noam Lewis (aka sinelaw) had asked me to add functionality to augment a list of DotGraphs using a single dot (or related command) process; however it turns out that for more than five DotGraphs this takes longer than doing each one individually. As far as I can tell, the problem relates to the rendering of the pretty-printed list of DotGraphs. As of now I’ve rolled back support for this, but I may try rendering to lazy text values, which will also let me avoid encoding problems by forcing usage of UTF-8.

I’ve also been asked by several people to add support for record labels; I’m doing so, but I got side-tracked into implementing proper support for HTML-like labels, which involves a lot of manual experimentation to determine what is valid syntax, etc.

Another area which involves manual experimentation: proper parsing of nodes and edges. Up until now, the library has assumed that there is at least a semi-colon between each individual statement in Dot code. This is not actually the case (which I found out when trying to parse the output of ghc-pkg dot), but when I tried to change this to assuming that each line ended in either a semicolon or a newline (I’m a mathematician, so or implies both as well!) then the edge a -> b was instead parsed as just the node a (with a parsing failure for the rest of the input). What makes it even better is that this is a valid Dot graph:

digraph { a b -> d c -> b -> a [color="red"] }

Now, how the hell am I meant to sensibly parse that?!?!? (Note: it isn’t the multi-edge c -> b -> a that’s the problem; the library can already cope with that; it’s just being able to tell when a particular statement ends and another begins). Bonus points if you can tell just by looking at it which edges are coloured red.

Welcome!

Greetings and salutations be upon thee to my little corner of what we like to charmingly call "the internet". This is where I put forth cunning arguments and repartee on such topics as Haskell, Gentoo, university... just don't ask me if I have a social life :s